Making our Children Pay for Mitigation

Investments in mitigating climate change have their greatest environmental impact over the long-term. As a consequence the incentives to invest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions today appear to be weak. In response to this challenge there has been increasing attention given to the idea that current generations can be motivated to start financing mitigation at much higher levels today by shifting these costs to the future through national debt. Shifting costs to the future in this way benefits future generations by breaking existing patterns of delaying large-scale investment in low-carbon energy and efficiency. As we will see in this chapter, it does appear to be technically feasible to transfer the costs of investments made today to the future in such a way that people alive today do not incur any net cost (e.g. Foley, 2009; Rendall, 2011; Broome, 2012; Rezai et al., 2012; Rozenberg et al., 2013). The basic idea then is that governments can break current patterns of delaying mitigation investments by ensuring that their existing constituents do not need to make significant sacrifices. The normative argument that we should finance mitigation by ‘borrowing from the future’ can be advanced in two general ways. The first is based on the empirical prediction that we will continue to see a pattern of very weak motivation among current generations to accept short-term mitigation costs. Thus, unless it becomes economically beneficial over the short-term to markedly increase investments in low-carbon energy and efficiency we should not expect to see sufficient investment to avoid dangerous levels of global warming. On this view finding a way to pass on the costs of mitigation to future generations is an imperfect solution to the problem of weak moral motivation today but much better than the status-quo (Broome, 2012, 37-48). On the second view, because we have good reason to expect that people in the future will be wealthier than people today (at least over the next century or so) and because the benefits of mitigation largely benefit people in the future, passing on most of the costs of mitigation to the future is actually a fair way to distribute these costs (Rendall, 2011). Notice that the second view is not dependent on the empirical premise that people today will not be motivated to make sufficient short-term sacrifices, although the problem of motivating the present will give additional support to the argument for redistributing costs to the future. In this chapter I focus on the implications of the first approach. Specifically, the aim of this chapter is to take seriously the possibility that climate change has produced an extremely intractable political problem and that we must now consider strong measures that can break existing patterns of delaying mitigation. I defend the claim that if climate change involves a stark conflict of interests between current and future generations, then borrowing from the future would be both strategically and normatively much better than the status quo. However, I nevertheless challenge the borrowing from the future proposal on the grounds that it is not in fact the powerful tool for motivating existing agents that its proponents imagine it to be. The purpose of developing this critical argument is not, however, simply to throw doubt onto the idea of borrowing from the future. Debt financing climate mitigation is a form of intergenerational buck-passing. In the climate ethics literature this type of buck-passing is usually viewed as deeply objectionable. As a consequence, normative theorising about climate governance tends to focus on institutional reforms that better represent the interests of future generations and inhibit buck-passing. My ultimate concern in this chapter is to argue that we cannot limit prescriptive normative theorising about climate governance to these types of reforms. If we really do find ourselves in a